Edwin Seward Puller

“ Scout camps and hikes are a school for training the imagination in the legends of the woods and of animal life, which are inspired by the mystery of the camp fire and the glorious solitude of the starry night, faintly stirred by the wind in the tree tops. The gleam of wavering lights from the camp fire transforms the faces of the circling scouts into animated sprites. Ascending flames split the darkness into dancing shadows which people the surrounding woods with living myths and fables. ”

“ It is the world of books. Let your boy escape for a time from the meanness of the boy across the street, and let him roam the woods with Hiawatha, sail the seas with Sindbad, build stockades with Crusoe, fight dragons with Jason, joust with Galahad; let him play at quoits with Odysseus, and at football with Tom Brown. These are playmates who will never quarrel with him nor bully him, but from whom he will learn to be brave, self-reliant, manly, quick to do for others, and set with his face toward the light. ”

“ ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY THE period of adolescence is truly one of storm and stress, caused by the wrecking of boy-nature to rebuild it into man-nature; it is a cataclysmic bursting of the bonds of infancy in preparation for the larger stature of manhood. In early adolescence the boy is neither child nor man. He is in the chrysalis stage of metamorphosis, which is shedding the characteristics of childhood and putting on the maturity of the adult. Neither one nor the other, he is a part of both. Adolescence covers the period of the boy’s life between puberty and maturity. ”

“ Harsh and stern estimates of childish frailties usually result from the application of the adult viewpoint and the adult standard. The failure to consider the viewpoint and standards of the adolescent causes much injustice to the boy and results in many mistakes in his training.
The brightness, joyousness, and optimism of youth suffuses life with an iridescent glow. All the world is bathed in roseate hues when seen through the rose-colored glasses of youth. ”

“ The aloofness of children toward certain adults is because they have nothing in common. Each misunderstands the other. As it is obviously impossible for the child to understand and attune himself to adult mental processes, it becomes necessary for the adult to comprehend child-nature and to put himself in harmony with it.
Happy the man who can make himself a boy again! He retains a thousand joys which other adults have irretrievably lost. Such a one is a natural leader and teacher of boys. They delight to make him their hero. ”

“ When his mental development advances to a stage where he can differentiate clearly between fact and fancy; when the maturity of his mind enables him to draw clearer distinction between the real and the unreal, when, in a word, imagination is superseded by reason, then such errors will be impossible. His mistake was mental—not moral. Therefore, he was not culpable. I knew a loving mother who washed out her child’s mouth with soap as punishment for a similar “lie.” No graver injustice can be perpetrated by a parent than punishment for such an alleged offense. ”

“ The boy of this age worships a physical hero. Power, strength, and authority make a powerful appeal. His hero may be the policeman on his beat who is the emblem of physical strength and vested with the authority of law to make arrests; the fireman who displays wonderful courage in the rescue of imperiled persons from burning buildings; the engineer who guides the locomotive dashing like a meteor through the blackness of night; the prize fighter who has won a championship in the squared ring; or the baseball or football athlete whose [69] name is on every tongue. ”

“ Through them he first realizes that he is a social unit—a thread in the social fabric of humanity. Action, constant action, is the keynote to his present and the hope of his future. He aches for action. If the boy’s play and noise disturb you, do not squelch him, but rather provide him with a place in which he may exercise these manifestations of his nature without causing you annoyance. A playroom in the house or barn, a tent, the lawn, the park, the great woods of the country are all ideal playgrounds for boys which satisfy the savage spirit of his nature. ”

“ During infancy he is anchored in the harbor of home, surrounded by love and physical comfort; during early boyhood his bark is drifting on the current toward the sea; while the dawn of adolescence plunges him into an unknown and uncharted ocean, without rudder or compass by which to avoid the sunken reefs of danger and the rocks which wreck the development of character. The morally obligatory duty of child-culture must be encouraged, revived, trained, and put into operation. ”

“ Sheer intellectual power, resulting from the systematic acquisition of knowledge and training of the mind, produces a one-sided individual who lacks the restraints and guidance [6] imposed by moral and ethical concepts. He is like an ocean liner of tremendous speed and power but without chart, compass, or rudder. It is obvious that the intellectually brilliant crook, devoting his mental gifts to the accomplishment of his criminal purposes, is a less worthy and less useful citizen than the laborer of high character but limited knowledge. ”

“ The present-day tendency in the education of American children is to emphasize the importance of knowledge, health, and character in the order in which they are here set down. To confine the term “education” solely or chiefly to the acquisition of knowledge is to limit its meaning to its usual synonym of instruction or teaching. In its truer and broader sense it implies the discipline and development of the moral, physical, and spiritual faculties, as well as the purely intellectual faculty, for it is only through such comprehensive development that ideal maturity can be approached. ”

“ It is truly the age “when a feller needs a friend”—one [56] who can pilot him safely through the storm of adolescence to the calm of manhood.
Truancy reaches its flood tide during adolescence. The instinct of wanderlust appears in response to the promptings of his savage nature, his unease of mind, and his desire to know the unknown in the world about him, and culminates in runaways as a revolt against the exercise of parental authority which he believes to be unnecessarily restrictive or severe. ”

“ The vanity of the parent may answer that they already are splendidly endowed by heredity with all the virtues of mind, morals, and body possessed by their progenitors. But heredity is no such miracle worker. If heredity has equipped the child with a perfect physical machine it still remains necessary to teach him not only how to run it, but how to keep it in good condition. The perfect body will not, unaided, stay perfect, nor will it develop the strong mind and character. ”

“ As a matter of fact, it is just as likely that our Johnny has corrupted his associates as that they are the cause of his moral infractions. Never, under any circumstances, do we blame ourselves either for the poor quality of his training or for permitting his evil associations. His delinquencies reflect on us and hurt our pride, but we palliate the hurt by attributing them to causes which do not involve us. We are too ready to prove an alibi when called to the court of conscience and charged with responsibility. ”

“ This burden must be shouldered by the parent who should not only do the child’s thinking for him until the latter is able to do it for himself, but should also drill, train, and educate the boy until he is able to make nice distinctions between right and wrong, and should cultivate his will-power until he can school himself into an acceptance of the good as against the bad. Until the child’s mind, will, and moral sense have reached this stage of growth, the parent must substitute his own mind, will, and moral sense. ”

“ Not the least important among the many requirements of the scout is the good turn or kindness which he must do for someone every day without financial reward. The performance of the daily good turn develops courtesy, gallantry and social consciousness and fixes in his mind a realization of the fact that he is one of the threads in the social fabric of humanity. The boy-training of today, whether parental or organizational, should emphasize the importance of service to others, and the boy in whom this altruistic idea is grounded will not give his parents great cause for worry. ”

“ Johnny comes home to supper from the playground, whirling through the house with cyclonic energy and leaving a trail of gloves, hat, overcoat, and superfluous garments in his wake, intent on the only thing which is of absorbing interest to him at that moment—his immediate presence at table to alleviate the excruciating pangs of hunger which are gnawing at his [45] vitals. Everything else is forgotten in his efforts to satisfy the desires of the present. ”

“ So strongly is hero-worship implanted in his nature and so completely does it dominate his viewpoint that it remains, with gradually diminishing intensity, for many years thereafter. Happy the boy whose father is his hero and happy the father who is a hero to his son!
The objective of hero-worship is always an older male—never a female. No instance of normal heroine-worship has ever been noted. ”

“ When we come to realize that the true function of education is first of all to build strong character, second to develop a virile physique, and last of all to impart knowledge and discipline the mental faculties, we then will have evolved an educational system which will be effective in accomplishing its real purpose—the evolution of the child into the symmetrically equipped adult. ”

“ Ideal companions for our sons are more [217] difficult to find in real life than in fiction. The perfect boy may live somewhere—but not in my immediate neighborhood. The companions of our boy are usually worse than he—at any rate we think them so; if one is good-natured he may be a bully; if another is of high moral character he may be so lazy and untidy that his influence is unwholesome; a third may be untruthful, while still another may be so goody-goody that his influence is positively depressing. ”

“ There ought to be ample room in this great world of ours for the growth and development of our future men.
Objection is sometimes made that sports are a non-productive form of energy—a waste of time and strength which might be [111] employed in manual training or in work of economic value capable of being measured in terms of money. It is true that the athletics and games of boys have no money value, nor are they designed for such purpose, but the energy expended is not wasted. On the contrary, it is highly productive of both physical and moral growth. ”

“ Persistent, unjust, or excessive punishments, either of body or mind, furnish a powerful incentive for the boy to invoke his chief means of defense against superior force—evasion and prevarication. Such conduct is guaranteed to produce a youthful Munchausen.
What are a boy’s means of defense against a beating which he regards, either rightly or wrongly, as excessive or brutal? He has only two—flight and falsehood. He knows that he is incapable of matching physical strength with his parent. ”

“ We now consider another phase of misstatement of fact—the falsehood of the older boy. At the age of six or seven the mental fog begins to clear. He sees things in a truer, brighter light. The relationship of facts to each other becomes more and more cognizable. His moral faculties are emerging from a chaos of mental impressions. [140] This age, approximately, marks the birth of moral consciousness. His conception of right and wrong takes form and begins its process of development. ”

“ It is seldom that a parent does not earnestly desire high moral character in his offspring. He hopes in a blind, inchoate way that his son will become a well-rounded man—physically, mentally, morally, socially, spiritually. By what means that hope is to fructify he does not know. He is groping in the dark, hoping against hope that the miracle of evolution [17] will result in perfection, without the employment of the methods and agencies at his command which will assist to that end.
The first step, then, in the training of the boy is the training of the parent. ”

“ Through imagination we visualize the future and effect world progress. All the great inventions which have advanced civilization, the political reforms which have contributed to our liberties and happiness, and the monumental works of literature, music, art, and science, would have been impossible without the exercise of the imaginative faculty.
Imagination is not only of great value in educating the intellect and morals, but it is a desirable mental attribute which promotes sympathy, discloses latent possibilities of things and situations, and broadens one’s appreciation of life. ”

“ What profound emotions are stirred in the father’s breast when he realizes that his long years of intelligent training have borne fruit in the son he has sired; and what supreme joy comes to the mother when she beholds her son standing at the threshold of superb manhood and she can truly say, “I mothered a man!” ”

“ JUVENILE READING NEXT to environment and companions, books exercise the most powerful influence for good or evil on the life of the boy. His companionship with books is as intimate as his companionship with playmates and usually occupies as large a portion of his life, especially after puberty. The value of literature is two-fold: it molds the character and develops the taste, both of which processes are closely related. ”